Designing a Speculative social prosthetic to manage emotions?

Speculative Design for social prosthetics
Team Member — Arpit Paurush, Kaustubh Salunkhe, Shashwata Agnihotri

What is prosthetics?
A prosthesis is an artificial extension that replaces a missing body part. It is part of the field of biomechatronics, the science of fusing mechanical devices with human muscle, skeleton, and nervous systems to assist or enhance motor control lost by trauma, disease, or defect.

What is Social Prosthetics?
When we combine social and prosthetic together, the combined word means the use of a prosthetic for social concern or welfare of people in a community which will help in accomplishing or managing the daily task in social scenarios.

It is essential to understand that while solving the problem, we also give birth to different kinds of issues in our daily lives. The thoughtful and speculative design approach could help us in many ways, such as forming the debate in society to get insights or Highlight the issue of a technological solution to minimize its dark side of causality.

This approach increases the designer’s ability to think in an alternative way by applying a critical lens to view the role of the technology. As a responsible designer, it is our responsibility to visualize and experiment on this essential part of the solution to highlight those critical issues in the form of the narrative.

This narration helps the designer and the society to imagine the world from another perspective to form an understanding of upcoming future scenarios.

Here in our Speculative Design studio at Srishti Institute of Art Design and Technology, we as a group have demonstrated one such concept to highlight the implication of design in its near future.

Scenario 1: What if a Human gets the ability to manage /control his/her own emotions by the usage of technology to feel good?

In the current situation where mental health is an alarming bell for the community.

To manage better sleep, people are often getting dependent on dopamine pills to ease out the stress for proper sleep. There are many other prosthetics also available in the market to release stress or to change emotions.

There are also numerous research is happening and evolving day by day to manage emotion stress anxiety to feel good and relax in the day.

We understand that emotion plays a role of a trigger and affects our behavior, learning, and decision-making skills.

These emotions are the result of a chemical released by our brain called neurotransmitters. These neurotransmitters release a chemical based on a kind of event that occurred in a particular situation.

The feel-good smartwatch could detect the type of emotion by using semantic analysis. This semantic analytic includes a set of algorithm which detects the type of emotional response. It is used on social media platforms.

This detection emotion will happen with the usage of inbuild chips in the watch which could monitor heart rate pulse and other body behavior.

The product is a smartwatch that has a chip (skin patch ) installed at the back side of it, it can essentially monitor, store, and release certain amounts of specific chemicals to make user feel good. The watch contains a needle through which the chemical will be released in the body.

Dopamine, Serotonin, and Oxytocin

This chemical is responsible for initiating an emotional response and even helps to make people sleep and help in curing Parkinson's disease.

For the use case when dopamine is low it will give a trigger message to recharge now. A user has to click and the needle at the backside of the watch will inject the chemical in the body according to the need for the user.

These scenarios emphasize the use of the skin patch in the very usual situations of daily life where we need to manage the emotion to feel good and there are following behaviors which government also wants to manage. This watch could fulfill both needs.

Utopian Future
Our speculation explores a dystopian future where humans have developed the technology to efficiently manage these feel-good chemicals that naturally occur in our brain and critique the cause and effects of this technology at a larger scheme.

Two Scenarios are explained in the above video.

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